Casting conventional wisdom aside, Savannah High Principal Walter Seabrooks quickly developed a good feeling about the year ahead.

As he stepped onto the gym's hardwood floor on the first day of school, the new principal saw students packed to the rafters.

New attendance zones had caused the school's population to grow by about a third. Just one administrator remained from the year before. About 35 teachers were new to the school.

"This is your school," Seabrooks announced confidently.

The bearish ex-football player interpreted the students' relatively silent response as an good omen.

"When I was able to look around ...and capture students' attention without a mic," he said recently, "that within itself indicated, 'We're going to give you a chance.' "

It was a break Seabrooks certainly needed.

He had inherited a school with what he later described as "a number of challenges (attendance, student conduct, graduation rates and test proficiency among them) ... that have been ingrained over the years."

Fewer than six out of 10 Savannah High students had graduated on time in recent years, and many of those who did graduate arrived at college without the skills needed to succeed. Few students did well in high-level courses such as Advanced Placement, and the school's scores on the Georgia High School Graduation Test and other standardized exams were among the lowest in the district.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, President George W. Bush's sweeping school accountability measure, was also tightening like a vise around the school.

If Savannah High failed to meet certain performance targets during Seabrooks' first year, the district would be required to take "corrective action" such as reshuffling faculty, extending the school year or significantly reducing Seabrooks' management authority.

On that first day, one of the district and school's ingrained deficiencies was already casting a pall across the start of the year: Student schedules were not complete, essentially putting the school on stand-by.

Faculty held some students in the gym for nearly an hour before dismissing them to their homerooms, where they would wait even longer.

Other students crowded the school's media center for the opportunity to discuss their courses with a counselor.

Counselor Joseph Branscomb, who'd spent most of his 33 years with the district at Savannah High, said the delays were fairly normal for the first day.

These and other challenges led Seabrooks in October to liken the work ahead to building a ship in the water.

But while success would not be instantaneous, he insisted the school would improve.

Reflecting recently on the year gone by, he said Savannah High had made strides.

According to student achievement data, the school had met its No Child Left Behind performance targets. "All of the supplies needed for building the boat are at least on the dock," Seabrooks said.

Heavy lifting

Improving a struggling school is, by nature, a slow process, said Thomas Toch, co-director of Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

"I don't think a lot of people realize how complex schools are and how difficult the task is of taking a low-performing school and improving it dramatically," Toch said. "It's hard work."

Progress likely won't be measured in terms of test scores and graduation rates during the first year of a school improvement process, Toch said. Instead, advances should be made and measured based on the expectations established for curricular rigor, student academic performance and school operations, he said.

A lot of the heavy lifting will fall to the principal early on, Toch said.

"I think in the first year, though this would be invisible to the outside world, the principal has to have a very clear sense of who on his team is strong enough to turn a school around, to make it a good school," Toch said.

Since "failing schools are a function of a failing culture and the people in it," Toch said the principal also needs to identify the teachers who are a part of the problem and find ways to get them out of the school.

Seabrooks said that evaluation process is under way.

'Higher aspirations'

Several Savannah High teachers said Seabrooks has begun to turn the school in the right direction.

Math teacher Stephen Bush said the school's goals were primarily pragmatic: Get behavior under control and boost scores on the Georgia High School Graduation Test to get off No Child Left Behind's Needs Improvement list.

He said progress had been made in terms of discipline, and momentum was building for loftier academic goals.

"In terms of goals down the road," Bush said, "now there is almost the belief that we can make this a school that has academic excellence in it. ...In terms of the whole school, that's definitely beginning to take hold."

Bush, who's been at Savannah High three years, said teachers were previously more concerned with "survival" and just getting enough done for students to move forward.

"Now people are bringing out our aspirations a little higher," he said.

Virginia Charlot , a French teacher who recently finished her first year teaching, also noted improved student behavior over the course of the year.

Like other first-year teachers, she received assistance from a mentor, she said.

She also got support from the school's academic coach, who observes teachers and leads group sessions called "Professional Learning Communities."

Harolyn Cave, the academic coach, said these communities are about developing collegiality.

Teachers meet roughly once a week to discuss different instructional strategies.

Cave models exemplary methods for the group and serves as something of a best practices clearinghouse.

"High schools are so departmentalized," she said. "Sometimes (teachers) don't work with people outside of their department unless they're in the PLC."

Sandra Bunn, the Georgia Department of Education leadership facilitator assigned to Savannah High, sat in on many of those PLC sessions.

She cited them as evidence the school is headed in the right direction.

By bringing teachers together to share and discuss, she said, the school is "really getting to the point where you're looking at student work itself and talking about student work itself."

Charlot said her PLC "reminds her of what you need to do." "For me, being new, the best part is hearing teachers talk about how they manage (their work) and organize (their) classes."

Still, Charlot said it's hard to say how clear the direction is from the top.

"We talk about meeting (adequate yearly progress) in our PLC," she said, referring to the goals schools must meet under No Child Left Behind. "I don't know where we are in terms of meeting that. If I were an English teacher, I could probably say more specifically."

Charlot said her primary focus is getting through the fundamentals so she can expose her students, many of whom lack basic skills, to a broader world.

"It's hard to move everyone in the same direction," she said. "At the same time, we have loads of new teachers (and) you have veterans leading the way."

Many of those veterans, while reluctant to talk on the record, maintain an intense loyalty to Savannah High and resent what they see as the community's skewed view of the school.

Some of the school's top students also defended their school.

"I used to go to the Arts Academy. Supposedly, I'm coming from the best to the worst," said Rashad Armstrong, who'll attend Tennessee State in the fall. "It's the same way here. You always have the best teachers and the worst teachers. It's the same at any school."

The performance gaps between Savannah High and other schools, however, suggest boosting teacher quality remains a key challenge for the school.

'I think we made it'

As intended, No Child Left Behind has been both the carrot and the stick propelling Savannah High forward.

Like Seabrooks, teachers such as Bush and Charlot described the school's goals in terms of the law's targets, even as they admit they don't understand all of its intricacies.

Seabrooks said focusing on adequate yearly progress has also filtered down to students.

Teachers told them their performance on the math and English portions of the Georgia High School Graduation Test would determine whether the school met AYP. Students received targeted assistance in those areas.

The impact of that focus on the tests was evident when scores came back, Seabrooks said.

"When they received the scores back and students were saying, 'Mr. Seabrooks, did we make AYP?' or, 'Mr. Sea, I think we made it.' ... I think that was perhaps the most gratifying moment (of the school year)."

No Child Left Behind appears to be having similar effects at schools across the country.

A report released in March by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy found the law is pushing districts to better tie what they teach to state standards and more effectively use test data to guide teaching.

Additionally, the vast majority of state and district officials surveyed for the report said the law's focus on the performance of different demographic groups is having a positive effect.

Many school leaders also called the law's AYP provision an important factor in rising test scores, although many more cited district policies and programs as important contributors.

A village approach

No Child Left Behind, however, is far from a panacea.

Seventy-one percent of districts surveyed for the CEP report, for instance, reported reducing instructional time in at least one subject to allow for more time in reading and math.

Like the CEP report, Toch also noted that schools and states simply do not have the capacity to meet the law's demands.

"(Schools are) getting external pressure now ... but they don't really in many instances know what to do, or even if they do, they don't have resources in the broadest sense of the word," he said. "It's very difficult. There's a tremendous demand for people who can come in and help fix schools, who know what the three or four or five steps are ... That's tough work and the states don't have the capacity to do that work."

As a result, he said, states are focusing their efforts on the absolute lowest performing schools.

Savannah High has received state assistance in the form of Bunn, who spent about a day a week at the school, primarily working with Seabrooks and Cave to improve instruction.

But Bunn didn't start working at Savannah High until January, and she is the third leadership facilitator the school has had in two years.

She may not return to the school next year, depending on which schools in the region are most in need of assistance.

The district also provided Savannah High with a consultant through its contract with the Center for Performance Assessment.

It should receive even more local assistance next year since Superintendent Thomas Lockamy has reorganized the central office so academic support personnel can spend more time in schools.

The district is also developing plans for a more sweeping "high school redesign."

Seabrooks said he hopes to expand the support given to next year's ninth-graders and devote more attention to science, which he described as an "Achilles heel."

Seabrooks agrees with Lockamy and No Child Left Behind's emphasis on success for all students.

But he said that dream of success for every child will not be realized without an all-out effort from the proverbial village.

"We're all going to be successful or fall on our faces," he said.

Estimated percentage of students graduating on time:

02-03 03-04 04-05 05-06

State 63.3 65.4 69.4 *

District 56.7 53.9 69 71

SHS 39.6 49.2 56.3 64

* State data were not available.

Percentage of regular education juniors passing the Georgia High School Writing Test on their first try:

2000-01* 2004 2005

State 92 93 95

District 88 87 94

Savannah High 80 75 91

*Test was called the writing portion of the Georgia High School Graduation Test in 2000-01.